3:AM Magazine

Odes to Parkville

By Corey Wakeling.

1.
Amusing that a long ghost world of brackish
love is hagiography, here we will the power
to forget Lubbock to look towards a panoptic
New York. It pops, or does not. Whose height
is omniscient is the spectral hiss nescience
of a march in theory. Five seconds Parkville.

2.
Southside of Fitzroy Town Hall. Four children
with anamorphic adult legs, one bike and a basketball.
Towards a panoptic New York
the uneasy accommodation of self implicit,
my vernal shoulder collapses
and I take the rotten marrow bone home to bury.

3.
Will the power to forget Lubbock,
says Mum, her skiff collapsing.
All the bayous splinter in remorse, thankfully,
and indemnity pays for a return to a fruitful
zero which warrants Plum Duck at Green Field.
Cricket’s started again.

4.
Royal Park detains two immoveable statues
the Wheel of Fortune dizzies.
The crawling man has a bifurcated nose
which is enough apology, pavement’s blood
by night dances even when it is still,
not whose height omniscient is the spectral.

5.
North Melbourne, a march in theory,
preposterates the traitorous shoulder levy and
I do think we will dodge it to the last five
seconds we’re granted.
The plum duck pauses to compare glycerine
with the snot of the half-dead. Eucalypt jury.

6.
A children’s hospital is a solemn thing
even when the fourth of July is televised
to the dark morning in a system of LEDs
and the coughs of hot ballooning.
Seconds, Parkville pops or does not,
the unremembering plaques of a hospice.

7.
Does eight equate to two deaths not averted
by the halfway house, asks the torso’s
power to forget, an artisanal forge in which
correspond all these blood relations
more rotten than a craven morning half-lit
by solemnity and its strangers.

8.
Friendship’s autumn is a catastrophe preventative
when we boast it with fireworks. Pity each
firework already has a patron. Amusing that this
long hagiography is a nation’s keeper when it’s you
I love more than the floor. Look, it’s the bike path
which leads to the casuarina I hung from my wrist by.

9.
To disappear those hours. Ask epiglottitis
for a more permanent stay in Brunswick,
my optimism is a nuisance, nescience
of a march even to my version of memory,
which is a last tantrum in a city glade
that reminds most of a desolate Hampstead.

10.
Poor old savage club, and poor geriatric mercy.
The district is just another kind of elegy.
All those fingers lost in the dirt, and crane boulevard,
the many patrons of landscape. Amusing.
The hand here admits it feels every newcomer
approaching, one definition of anxiety.

11.
They are already prospecting a compartment
for your cadaver as the meantime swells
over an etherised skyline. Portal kicked in.
Look towards a panoptic new, those pleasure
craft that are deaf to mercy’s memory and you and I
watching a chameleon ideology topogram on iview.

12.
What is that eye in the dirt? One of the patrons.
Fireworks frenzy and the launch of two Sydney-bound
adventure narratives. I often think of poor, porous
Marcus Clarke. D, listen to Shillinglaw:
“nautical to a degree in his phraseology
as well as a most “robustious” singer of ‘chanteys’ ”.

13.
More. “Hydrographer to the British Navy”
a chant of Basque Country remembered on a napkin
is lamington subsistence not for long. Anyhow,
romance shines in my eyes, they say, depleted brackish.
That swoon in the hay was less tantric than mantra,
and had I cultural amnesia I would return to Ukraine.

14.
The impossible memory I want to bring to our children.
Yes, romance is a kind of science fiction, one way
or another, I admit. The type of gossip
which returns the promised friendship band
not to mercy but to nursing is as robust as a stripling
in a tsunami. Five seconds straight I have straight-talked.

15.
What were they doing in Royal Park, it’s without the river
and the pine needles and the birch wood? Epicures
have waylaid the river. What elegy for the patron nescience
is. Levies continue to keep the march from belonging.
Window-shopping, though, is an invitation to every stranger,
hence recognisable on the global usher competition circuit.

16.
Happy Birthday, massacre, so where’s that loot
you promised? Cane toad sensitivity to future
conservation but to look towards a crazy robustness
still makes for slow cantering up the parade.
Sutra, elegy, or otherwise, the napkin fictions are amazing.
Topography is winning documentary. Fast the eye.

ABOUT THE AUTHORCorey Wakeling is the author of Gargantuan Terrier, Buggy or Dinghy (Vagabond Press, 2012) and Goad Omen (Giramondo, 2013), and co-editor of Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land (Black Rider Press, 2013). He now lives in Nishinomiya, Japan.